Yesterday, Ace Attorney Online received an "almost Christmas" present (it was St. Nicholas's Day, after all). After a long wait, we've had an update! The last announced update was in March of 2020, but we've had some silent updates since then. The last one was in 2022, between March and June.
We hope in future to have more regular, smaller updates. We here means myself and ThePasch, the two active AAO developers, and presumably Unas as well. While both of us have lives outside of AAO (and I have other duties keeping the English section running), we do want to keep this going.
For those of you with some programming skill, the best way you can help is to get involved with programming Ace Attorney Online yourself. Send either of us a message, and we can help you get started. Otherwise, the best thing you can do is to put up clearly reproducible bug reports and feature requests. We greatly prefer threads rather than direct messages. If you've done that, then play some more trials, and tell the authors you played their cases!
My personal goal for the immediate future is to finish v2 of a certain tutorial of mine and get to some long overdue QA business before focusing on programming. This gives us some time for reports to come in if any problems that have been introduced in the latest update. Our priority for the next update, which we want to come our fairly soon, is to patch any problems we inadvertently introduced. We do our best to test these things, but some things slip through the cracks.
Post here if you notice any important changes! Details are in the two spoiler tags.
Spoiler : Change Log :
Feb. 2020 (Enthalpy) - Added and translated new German popups. This was live in the last reported update but wasn't reported.
[D]isordered speech is not so much injury to the lips that give it forth, as to the disproportion and incoherence of things in themselves, so negligently expressed. ~ Ben Jonson
Here is what the new expression engine functions do, for anyone curious. Most of it is for more advanced stuff:
f:get_var_val(stringA) gets the value of the variable with the name equal to stringA.
f:current_frame_id() returns the frame ID of the frame this expression is being called on.
f:str_replace(stringA,stringB,stringC) replaces all instances of stringB in StringA with stringC. StringC can also be omitted to replace all instances with a blank string. (e.g. f:str_replace('apple banana orange','banana','coconut') returns ‘apple coconut orange’)
f:str_pad_start(stringA,stringB,length) adds stringB to the beginning of stringA until it is at least as many characters as “length”. (e.g. f:str_pad_start('61','0',4) returns ‘0061’)
f:str_pad_end(stringA,stringB,length) adds stringB to the end of stringA until it is at least as many characters as “length”. (e.g. f:str_pad_end('61','0',5) returns ‘61000’)
f:str_length(str) returns a string’s length as an integer.
The last three have rather niche use cases, but people who want the player to enter text might get some use out of them.
Thanks for the explanations, TimeAxis! I've incorporated those into my variable guide.
[D]isordered speech is not so much injury to the lips that give it forth, as to the disproportion and incoherence of things in themselves, so negligently expressed. ~ Ben Jonson
Look ma, there's my name! Excited to see this update finally live, with all the little bugfixes and QoL tweaks. I have some thoughts regarding the new mobile layout changes but overall today is a great day to use the AAO editor.
Thrower of bricks. Things I have made or have directly helped make, in chronological order:
Thanks a lot to all contributors to this update, and to Enthalpy and ThePaSch for coordinating all of that !
I haven't been giving AAO any attention for years myself - well, except for the few hours spent to solve technical crises when the site goes offline, that is - but I'm grateful to everyone who still shows enough time and interest to actually help the editor and player evolve a bit without me
If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them. Si le savoir peut créer des problèmes, ce n'est pas l'ignorance qui les résoudra. ( Isaac Asimov )
Unas and I have released an update that means I can no longer reproduce the two most urgentbugs. Let us know if you're having any issues that lead to contaminated trials! I'll intervene personally.
ThePasch will be taking the lead on mopping up the remaining issues, such as mobile editor UI and merged frame behavior.
[D]isordered speech is not so much injury to the lips that give it forth, as to the disproportion and incoherence of things in themselves, so negligently expressed. ~ Ben Jonson
